No Idea What to Do With Rogues

So I might be late to the meeting, but am I the only one starting to get the impression that we're not just being ignored, but that Blizzard actually just has no idea what to do with rogues to bring some life back into the class? The last fix was the legendaries, but now they're faced with actually addressing mechanics and they've just got no idea what to do, especially since they gave the easiest fix, player oriented combo points, to monks. I mean really, stealth aside, is there any real mechanical difference between a windwalker monk and a rogue with player oriented combo points?

So I might be late to the meeting, but am I the only one starting to get the impression that we're not just being ignored, but that Blizzard actually just has no idea what to do with rogues to bring some life back into the class? The last fix was the legendaries, but now they're faced with actually addressing mechanics and they've just got no idea what to do, especially since they gave the easiest fix, player oriented combo points, to monks. I mean really, stealth aside, is there any real mechanical difference between a windwalker monk and a rogue with player oriented combo points?

I really have to agree with this. My rogue has been my main ever since vanilla and I have been happy with her ever since. But this xpac (and I know its early and we dont have access to decent gear yet) I just don't feel like rogue's are working properly. And every patch I look down the list of changes, and I see something for every class, yet rogue's are always missing from the list. Blizzard can't really think Rogue's are in a good spot right now.... But I still stick it through hoping that things will get better

I think that it's about random PVP, but then I'm not sure why they didn't hotfix-nerf them in 4.3.

But, let's think about it. Read around our own rogue or PVP forums and then the official forums or any other WoW related forum. What do you see somehow often about rogues? Hate. Why? Because it's true, the rogue class can be very annoying because you don't see them coming, ganking or BGs. People hate being caught in a bad situation by an opponent they couldn't see coming and if the class has high burst, the surprise factor can be enough to make you panic and automatically get destroyed. Right now, with the class not being that good, 99% of my kills happen inside a stun with the opponent not able to move for a while. This is very frustrating.

So what happens? That everything that Blizzard does to rogues has PVP in mind. Look at the talent trees, it's lazy PVP-oriented work! Only six talents can be considered new, the rest are a mix of old skills or old talents being improved and brought back. How many of the talents are PVP focused? The majority. A raider rogue could avoid picking any talent of the first 5 tiers and very little would change. Opener burst was nerfed by moving away a lot of damage from abilities like mutilate and backstab to auto-attack damage, that's why we have so much of it.

I'm very annoyed at how little rogues have changed during all these years and all specs are becoming closer and closer to each other. I'd hate to get to the point that combat also, at some point, favors mastery as favourite secondary stat, so all three specs are basically clones of each other.

Have the Assassination rogue focus on poisons, including being able to throw flasks of poisons with different effects (like, throwing the non-lethal poisons) and having mutilate hit HARD. Have the Combat rogue feel like a swashbuckler with Riposte-like abilities. And have the Subtlety rogue be focused on being sneaky by giving them mini-vanishes (doesn't get you into stealth) and getting back Preparation and stuff.

I have played my monk a little bit. Why I still prefer the rogue, it's very funny how I tend to refresh my chi in new targets or try to redirect.

Shadow Walk : Significantly increases Stealth effectiveness for 6 sec, but causes Stealth to be nerfed to justify its usage. In addition, it uses old Enveloping Shadows icon and has no sound, animation or spell effect to show that the skill is actually doing something.

I don't think the problem is a general "lack of ideas" - But rather the knowledge that there is no "simple fix". They know changing the class in any way would be a huge endeavor; They know they will have to spend a lot of man hours trying to solve all the problems; And they know that they do not want to do that.

Right now, the class is in a "good" place economically. It's designed with ease in mind. NOT FOR THE PLAYER, but for the developer. Notice how they didn't have to change our numbers by much during the beta? They almost hit the dps-mark on the head, just with their initial calculations. Numbers were very turbulent for all the other classes, but not for rogues. That's because we're "easy to fix" dps-wise.

They like that fact that we're easily manageable, and they dislike the thought of that no longer being the case.

---------- Post added 2012-10-12 at 08:34 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Sendai

-Snip-

"With rogues, they do everything with PVP in mind."
And yet, we're still horrible in PVP, as of launch... :P

It's a rather strange situation with the talents and glyphs vs our damage output.
- Our output is solely balanced around PVE; We work to a satisfactory degree in PVE because the nature of damage doesn't really matter, be it burst or sustained.
- As a result of the above, our damage isn't balanced for PVP, because the nature of damage matters in PVP. Extremely passive, sustained damage is just useless.
- On the other hand, our talents and glyphs are being made with PVP in mind, seeing as they mainly address "flaws" of our already extensive toolkit.

Some of the talents simply look like they were baseline already, but were ripped out of the original abilities simply to create a talent. Seriously, why does Dirty Tricks exist? Why is Anticipation baseline for everyone but us? Why do we actually need Versatility when no one else does? Are the glyphs of Blind and Gouge really necessary? Why does Recuperate depend on a glyph to do just a BIT more healing? These talents/glyphs all add features to our abilities that should be baked into them baseline; They do not add to the usefulness of our toolkit, they are necessary for our toolkit to be useful at all.

Either way; This whole dilemma creates a strange dichotomy.
- Our damage is made for PVE.
- Our talents, our toolkit, and our glyphs all only address PVP.

I can make a case that the developers don't spend the required time. They treat us as if we are an offspec or something, when it comes to actual developer time. Here's what I mean:

1)- Anticipation is implemented as a stacking buff on the rogue. This is honestly stupid. This should have a UI pairing, just as balance does. More rogues will spend meaningful time with anticipation than druids will spend as balance, yet this dorky UI element requires a (nonexistent) GUI enhancement to work. The 15 second duration also seems silly.

Anticipation should be implemented as a second row of combo points, changing existing combo points blue, a second row of alternately colored combo points, or something. It should be MORE COMBO POINTS.

The current implementation was clearly the cheapest, dirtiest, and fastest solution. When my monk gets her fifth ki point, she doesn't have it as some damned retarded buff. Do your jobs, devs!

2)- Versatility should mean "combo points on the rogue". This should require an internal rework, so it's a lot of effort. I don't care. Every other class has this baseline, has the combo points on them, and while I don't really care if this is a baseline thing for rogues, the talent should at least do its damned job. Redirect is a dumb button to press and takes a global.

Versatility should say "Your combo points are no longer linked to the target, but will disappear if you don't add to or use them within 30 seconds."

3)- Deadly Throw doesn't feel like a talent, and never will. This is a baseline ability that they screwed up hard. It's in the tree because they couldn't think of anything else, full stop.

4)- Bandit's Guile, while finally functional, still has a terrible UI element. You might have Bandit's Guile helper, the only addon I've run into that tracks this nicely. It also shows you the stack number, something the default UI does not. This should also have a dedicated UI element.

Now, those aren't the only things I don't like about the current state of rogues, and there's plenty more that I love about rogues (Shuriken Throw Yay!). But these things are pretty solid evidence that working on rogues is a pretty low priority for them. Heck, if you go above three holy power, that shows in the UI right? Other specs have UI specific elements- balance has the sun-moon bar, for instance. Why not Bandit's Guile and Anticipation?

I meant that they have the PVP consequences, like, people whining because the bad rogue killed them in a stun. I still do that.

After doing more arenas and BGs, I'd like to see these changes :
-Shadow Step baseline and Preparation removed. Have all three talents to be mobility and one about improving Shadow Step.
-Deadly Throw back to baseline.
-CDs reduced back to Elusiveness level or lower.
-Find Weakness nerfed (or burst will get out of hand sooner or later)
-Backstab/Mutilate/Hemo/Dispatch buffed to compensate.
-Recuperate buffed.

With that, I'd be quite happy.

Shadow Walk : Significantly increases Stealth effectiveness for 6 sec, but causes Stealth to be nerfed to justify its usage. In addition, it uses old Enveloping Shadows icon and has no sound, animation or spell effect to show that the skill is actually doing something.

Anticipation should be implemented as a second row of combo points, changing existing combo points blue, a second row of alternately colored combo points, or something. It should be MORE COMBO POINTS.

No that would be a horrible nerf. Right now you can basically redirect your Anticipation points to another target by targetting something else and using SnD/Recup/CT. To lose that utility would not make us better.

No that would be a horrible nerf. Right now you can basically redirect your Anticipation points to another target by targetting something else and using SnD/Recup/CT. To lose that utility would not make us better.

You could still redirect all combo points to the next target? ...
SND and Recuperate don't even benefit from Anticipation, since the points don't come back to be used.

Shadow Walk : Significantly increases Stealth effectiveness for 6 sec, but causes Stealth to be nerfed to justify its usage. In addition, it uses old Enveloping Shadows icon and has no sound, animation or spell effect to show that the skill is actually doing something.

No that would be a horrible nerf. Right now you can basically redirect your Anticipation points to another target by targetting something else and using SnD/Recup/CT. To lose that utility would not make us better.

Slice and Dice and Recuperate do not "activate" Anticipation, and using a CP-builder ONCE, just to get off a CT to activate Anticipation is a horrendous dps-loss, and a risky one at that in case the Anticipation buff drops before you get the CT off. Anticipation doesn't work very well as a pseudo Redirect. It's a different take on Ruthlessness, and ought to be used as such.

You could still redirect all combo points to the next target? ...
SND and Recuperate don't even benefit from Anticipation, since the points don't come back to be used.

Why would I want to waste a CD when I could do it for free? And hadnt even paid attention to the Recup/SND not doing it. Especially for Sub you can get the 20% damage from having a CT up, so rather than Evisc a mob thats going to die you can simply move onto another target and do more damage. The suggested change is still bad.

Why would I want to waste a CD when I could do it for free? And hadnt even paid attention to the Recup/SND not doing it. Especially for Sub you can get the 20% damage from having a CT up, so rather than Evisc a mob thats going to die you can simply move onto another target and do more damage. The suggested change is still bad.

Let me ask you a counter question; Why would you want to stack 5 initial combo points on a target... Then stack another 5 Anticipation charges... Let your target, and the 5 combo points you had on it die... Then switch to another target?

You lose 1 Eviscerate by doing so, just to "ease" the transition from 1 target to another, for no apparent reason at all.

Why would I want to waste a CD when I could do it for free? And hadnt even paid attention to the Recup/SND not doing it. Especially for Sub you can get the 20% damage from having a CT up, so rather than Evisc a mob thats going to die you can simply move onto another target and do more damage. The suggested change is still bad.

I really don't understand what you are talking about. Having a second row of combo points would make Anticipation a million times better than what we have right now. By the say, Sanguinary Veins is 16% now.

Shadow Walk : Significantly increases Stealth effectiveness for 6 sec, but causes Stealth to be nerfed to justify its usage. In addition, it uses old Enveloping Shadows icon and has no sound, animation or spell effect to show that the skill is actually doing something.

Let me ask you a counter question; Why would you want to stack 5 initial combo points on a target... Then stack another 5 Anticipation charges... Let your target, and the 5 combo points you had on it die... Then switch to another target?

You lose 1 Eviscerate by doing so, just to "ease" the transition from 1 target to another, for no apparent reason at all.

No you dont lose evisc, because you can pool energy. We arent a class where our DPS is actually based on DP/GCD, we're based on DPE. If you can pool energy from a mob that rupture has fallen off for example but will die in the next 5 seconds, its a huge DPS gain to just let anticipation stack from HaT, gain energy, then swap with a CT straight into a big evisc.

By the say, Sanguinary Veins is 16% now.

So we do have a tooltip fix coming in 5.1?! When did that change go in, I have to be honest Ive not done a good job of watching official forums lately, mostly checking EJ for stat weights.

Also why would a second row of CPs make it better than it currently is?

No you dont lose evisc, because you can pool energy. We arent a class where our DPS is actually based on DP/GCD, we're based on DPE. If you can pool energy from a mob that rupture has fallen off for example but will die in the next 5 seconds, its a huge DPS gain to just let anticipation stack from HaT, gain energy, then swap with a CT straight into a big evisc.

Anticipation doesn't work with HAT. It only stacks the combo points gained from you attacks, if I'm not mistaken. Letting Rupture fall off also results in reduced auto-attack damage, and is therefore STILL a loss of dps.

That doesn't answer my question, by the way. There's no reason NOT to Eviscerate immediately, unless Rupture is about to fall off, in which case applying Rupture again as fast as possible should be your number one priority.

Anticipation doesn't work with HAT. It only stacks the combo points gained from you attacks, if I'm not mistaken. Letting Rupture fall off also results in reduced auto-attack damage, and is therefore STILL a loss of dps.

That doesn't answer my question, by the way. There's no reason NOT to Eviscerate immediately, unless Rupture is about to fall off, in which case applying Rupture again as fast as possible should be your number one priority.

If a mob is nearly dead, there is no point applying rupture. Rupture has the lowest DPS of all our finishers, it only has high DPE, if you wont get the full 24 seconds of it then you dont want to use it, CT is an extra 150~ DPS in my gear for just one target, if you have 3 targets then CT is better than Rupture at all times.

Hmm those anticipation points I thought were HaT must have been Rupture or Hemo dot ticks or something, was getting a lot of them on Fengore.

So we do have a tooltip fix coming in 5.1?! When did that change go in, I have to be honest Ive not done a good job of watching official forums lately, mostly checking EJ for stat weights.

Also why would a second row of CPs make it better than it currently is?

Yeah, tooltips need to be fixed. SV was changed 20th September.

A second row would mean :
-That you can access the saved combo points with all finishers, including Slice and Dice and Recuperate.
-That you can not lose them like it can happen with Anticipation. It happens in PVE, especially if there's movement and it happens all the time in PVP (Some top rogues are using it, I don't like it)

Shadow Walk : Significantly increases Stealth effectiveness for 6 sec, but causes Stealth to be nerfed to justify its usage. In addition, it uses old Enveloping Shadows icon and has no sound, animation or spell effect to show that the skill is actually doing something.

A second row would mean :
-That you can access the saved combo points with all finishers, including Slice and Dice and Recuperate.
-That you can not lose them like it can happen with Anticipation. It happens in PVE, especially if there's movement and it happens all the time in PVP (Some top rogues are using it, I don't like it)

The first can simply be implemented into current Anticipation, the second surely its more likely that it would happen if it was a second row? For example first boss Moshogun vaults, tank taunts away the one your anticipation is on and you've lost CPs, if you SnD off it with current you can then start building on a new target and unlock the anticipation points after your rupture/evisc.